Aves Ascendant
by ScarletDeva
Summary: The former Rangers have long left their teenage heroics behind. When a new kind of alien enemy appears, they have choices to make.


Author's Note: I think I initially started writing it for a fest we were doing? But it took me ages and ages to finish it. Big thanks to JTrevizo for just about everything and shout-out to my husband who military checked this and even wrote battle bits for me. Any errors are my own.

* * *

It was war.

Not the kind of war that the former Rangers knew, power imbued teenagers against singular alien monsters, or even the kind they saw on TV, human against human.

No, this was a full scale alien invasion attempt.

An armada of dull pewter quenelles that they barely recognized as ships hovered in high orbit, just out of the functional reach of any weapon that Earth could launch. Sometimes, mini-ships would break away, hurtling towards Earth faster than NATO, the Russians, or the Chinese could launch a nuke, and would deposit a major strike force of heavily armored, humanoid soldiers in the middle of an urban center. After two months of battle, Berlin, Sydney, and Los Angeles were rubble. The raging fight for Tokyo was on its eighth day.

But it wasn't just troops that the invaders dropped.

The invaders controlled orbit and used that advantage to ruthless effect. Ortillery, or orbital artillery, was long thought as the ultimate advantage of the high ground of space. American military planners had naturally assumed that, when such technology was developed, they would be the ones to utilize it. Being on the receiving end was an unpleasant surprise.

Using Newton's very simple, very unforgivable three laws, the alien ships were, in some cases, literally dropping rocks on the besieged planet. Sometimes, these projectiles were targeted on supply dumps, troop concentrations, and other military targets, with devastating results. When they were dropped on population centers, the results were even worse. Boston, Amsterdam, and Karachi had been virtually leveled from orbit, the shattered teeth of urban remains staring into the silent skies like a mute reprimand.

NATO had responded, dusting off decades-old mobilization plans and quickly coordinating with Russian and Indian forces. The Chinese weren't cooperating, exactly, but they were adapting their military response to the invasion with the rest of Earth's major military powers.

At an appalling cost, the invaders had been driven out of central Germany by a combined Russian/NATO force. Los Angeles had been retaken by a combined Marine/Army force that conducted an amphibious invasion of the port in order to cut the invaders off from their landed dropships. The battle currently raging in Japan's heartland was looking less certain. The JSDF, while lavishly well equipped, did not have much in the way of training, and the United States had been largely unable to reinforce the Japanese as of yet.

Worst of all, nothing at all was learned from the invaders. Not a single one had been taken alive and all of the few recovered dead bodies self-destructed if anyone tried to remove any part of the all-encompassing armor, a deadly lesson learned at the cost of several lives.

And the most gut-wrenching part was that the former Rangers were relegated to watching it on news, helpless to assist without any of their old powers, no mystical force calling them back to action.

So they also watched each other, worriedly, surreptitiously, waiting to see who broke first.

No one was surprised when it was Jason who signed up in response to the second world-wide enlistment call. College educated, he went right into accelerated officer training and then on to battle.

Tokyo was lost but international forces were holding firm at the outskirts of the Japanese capital. Three weeks of brief but upbeat emails were all signed "Jase" but read with the voice of the former red leader... they shook their heads but it wasn't just the typical Scott, duty-filled dependability that made stomachs quiver and breaths catch in all the wrong places. It was also the bone-deep knowledge that he was only the first. A knowledge that was as terrifying as strangely warming with its inevitability.

Then Aisha took leave from her position with the Nairobi National Park and joined the United Nations support and rescue efforts in Karachi. Her nightly emails were lengthy, feeling confessionals, jubilant with every saved human. She never mentioned those she lost.

Then the next call came.

Trini, fresh out of her oncology rotation at Johns Hopkins, stumbled into her tiny studio apartment not far from Patterson Park right as the phone rang.

"lo," she mumbled, as she put away her keys, hung her jacket and dropped her bag on her hideous swamp green couch all without taking more than three steps.

"Trini."

The sound of Zack actually calling her by her name broke her right through her half asleep haze. "Who is it," she demanded, clutching the phone tighter against the hysteria which was threatening to rise up her throat, counting her precious ones on nerveless fingers.

"There's this program that Billy was just telling me about...no, don't worry it's not him. But see it's this program sponsored jointly by the Brits, the Air Force and NASA. They've pushed this program into high-gear that's been developing fighters that can exit the atmosphere and they're recruiting pilots..." Zack detailed slowly.

pilots.

...not...

couldn't be...

...definitely is.

"It's Kim," Zack said finally and shattered the denial bubble that Trini was trying to frantically wrap around herself. Her spine snapped straight, her joints locking stiffly, and her lips thinned, pressed together while three fingers of her free hand curled under her thumb. One...two...three...four?

The next day she changed her specialization to general surgery, ignoring the vociferous protests of her Dean, and signed onto the wartime accelerated program.

And, within the week, Tommy enlisted in the US Army.

The dam broke.

Several days after Zack lost the bet but before he fulfilled its terms, a petite brunette strolled into the cavernous simulation room, zipping her silvery flight suit up to her throat. She headed right for a blond, who was crouched next to one of the sim machines. The side panel was swung open, and both of his arms were elbow deep in the machine's mechanical guts. Footsteps sure and silent on the plasticky-padded floor, she approached him from behind and then jammed a hand in his t-shirt clad side.

The blond yelped, jerking away from the unexpected invasion, and landed right on his butt.

"Kimberly," he said with a huff, his blond fringe falling haphazardly over his forehead.

"Billy," she returned with a grin. "I've got my quals in fifteen. You gonna finish in time?"

He sighed, brushed off his hands, a hopeless task when his skin was liberally smeared with machine grease, and climbed back to crouching position. "Have I ever let you down before?"

She lost her smile, brown eyes steady and serious. "Never. And I promise I am going to ace my quals."

"Your performance is my last concern," he muttered, as his deft fingers twisted and turned the mechanical pins inside the sim.

She laughed, checking her ponytail to ensure it was secure on the back of her head. "Aww is widdle Billy scared that big bad Trini is going to come take his head off? Come on. I'm a big girl. This was my decision."

He spared her a glare, pale eyebrows tilted above darkened blue eyes.

"I bet you even made Zack call her. Would have been Jase if he hadn't had the sense to enlist before I did."

Billy did not reply. He pulled his hands from the sim and clicked the panel closed, reaching for the rag hanging off the sim to wipe off the grease. "There, the machine is optimized for your examination. I expect that you will exceed their expectations, Little Crane."

She tugged him to his feet, filthy hands and all, and threw her arms around him. "You know I will. Won't let you down either."

He squeezed her tightly, silent for a moment. "All I request is that, next time, you advise Trini of any hare-brained schemes yourself."

Any reply she was about to make was cut off by four high ranking military officials, each clad in a different uniform, branch and country, but all wearing similarly intent expressions. They were her examiners.

It was time.

Kimberly Anne Hart, who was a rising star in the non-for-profit world just a few months ago, and was now a promising pilot and squadron leader for the Alpha Program, let off the throttle and took a deep breath to calm what felt like a cocktail mix of fear and adrenaline-shot excitement. Her brand new fighter, which she nicknamed Dee to honor an old friend, handled like a dream as she plotted a course for Ukraine, her squadron forming around her. Her control panel blinked agreeably and Kim ate the sky like she dreamed about for years.

Neither she, nor her squadron, was supposed to be out in battle yet but man plans and the gods laugh. Or in this case, alien invaders laugh.

Allied forces detected movement at the alien fleet and the Alpha Program had no choice but to release barely tested pilots into the sky.

From base, it took only minutes to arrive in the airspace above Kiev, the capital city of the Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe, and a major transportation hub as the Allies marshaled their resources to combat the invasion. The aliens had managed to land one invasion force already, three days prior, and it was imperative to prevent any more hostiles from hitting the ground as a relief force largely comprised of Russian Federation reserve divisions drove hard to buttress the defenders.

Kim ratcheted her throttle and turned Dee straight up, starting the arming sequence on her weapons systems in preparation, hoping to hit them early and hit them hard. She grunted as the g-forces the lithe aerospace interceptor generated in her turn caused her vision to blur at the edges.

And that was when the bright blue skies, gently edged with a lace ribbon of cloud, exploded with alien ships and a heavy rock-fall, accompanied by grey-brown dust tails that might have been beautiful if they didn't signal death.

The rocks, dropped so precisely to cover the advent of the alien ships, seemed to rain heavily not just on all of the prominent landmarks below and the Allied forces on the ground but also on the Allied fighters.

Kim knew there was no way the rocks could be targeted to moving targets but it sure did feel that way as she flipped her ship upside down to back away from the heaviest concentration of the rockfall. She was just grateful that the alien ships seemed to be strictly dropships designed to put troops on the ground, emitting no fire of their own.

Dee, however, came complete with teeth and claws.

She rolled back around and smacked the arming trigger and whooped as her control targeted the closest drop ship. Let's do this… Quick and agile, she bared her teeth in a grin as she danced Dee into position and felt more than heard the steady staccato of her guns going off. The fighters were armed with heavy cannon taken from the American A-10, which was normally designed to chew through the armor of tanks. It was barely adequate against the advanced armor the aliens used. The sheet-tearing sound of two Avenger cannon caused her teeth to rattle, but the depleted uranium bullets had the desired effect. The stream of rounds walked through the aft half of the descending dropship, stitching through armor and pulping the troops inside. A secondary explosion touched off as the landing craft began a slow tumble to the burning city twenty thousand feet below.

Clicking on the squadron-wide scrambled comms, Kim ordered, "All elements, break and attack by flights. Stick together and remember your training." A brief pause as one of her enhanced air-to-air missiles locked on to another dropship.

A chorus of replies sounded over the intercom, the last two elements slower than they should have been - pilots likely sluggish from the high gravity burn to intercept - but Kim did no more than absently log it as she automatically adjusted for kickback and shifted over to avoid Dmitriy's targeting, always a few degrees off. Her flight-suit and helmet felt stifling, sticky, inferior to whatever space-age stuff Zordon made Ranger suits from. She could take the heat.

"Fox Two!"

The code, a signal to her squadron that Kim had launched a heat-seeking missile into the fray, was soon followed by other, similar calls. The air-to-air missile quickly accelerated out ahead of the human fighters, unerringly narrowing in on Kim's intended target, which was bleeding heat white-hot on her thermal scopes. Powered orbital re-entry tended to heat hulls to the point a blind man could see them, a fact that the human fighter pilots used to ruthless effect. Several missiles ultimately were locked on the same targets, but that was fine-the dropships' thick armor meant that a single missile was often not a kill.

Kim saw her missile impact just behind what intelligence suspected was the cockpit of the dropship, triggering several secondary explosions as fuel lines and control feeds were turned to sharp, dank confetti. Two more missiles from her squadrons detonated on her target, blowing it out of the sky as the combined high explosive from three Sidewinders hit in tandem.

She whooped, her finger glued to the triggers now as she walked her fire onto another target, and watching her squadron form, fire, adjust, fire... The thin air at the edge of the atmosphere was becoming thick with smoke, dust, spews of broken down rock. The rockfall thickened sporadically, the alien armada trying to protect its troops. The fact that the dropships were attempting to maneuver clear of the avenging human fighters did nothing but add further chaos to the engagement, as Kim saw one descending projectile lance through an enemy dropship without even slowing down.

Kim could hear herself breathe, hear the rush of her blood under her skin, hear the surge of adrenaline pump into veins… She knew she was imagining it, imagining the roar in her ears and the cry of a bird in flight. That was okay. She reached for that cry as she spun Dee away from a sure impact. Dee was taking damage, but mostly superficial, unlike the damage she was dealing with each rat-tat-tat. Another dropship spiraled away, throwing off a heavy black trail. And then pieces - the same self-destruct as in each alien soldier armor.

The battle was spiraling entropy. It was driving home how vulnerable they all were without Ranger Zords and Ranger powers and how different it was fighting these aliens, who came in droves, unlike the formulaic assault from the Moon villains. This was no fight, grow, die. This was real. And Jason was down there. She promised Billy that she wouldn't let him down. She couldn't let Jase down either.

Twenty feet away from her, a rock smashed head-down onto one of her fighters, taking it out faster than she could do more than blink, leaving nothing more than sediment to testify that the fighter was ever there. Fuck. Kenji.

Kim bit her lip and intensified her fire. Take that, assholes. You can't just come and take without us taking back.

She zipped around more falling shrapnel, detonating another missile load as the air continued to rock around her. It was cold comfort that the dropship force was taking heavy damage, more of them detonating from impact and more and more losing cohesion.

And that was apparently as much give as they were getting because her alarms claxoned wildly, her display going insane, as the ships above released more… dropships? No. The new aerials were elongated bullet shaped machines with crystalline hulls that revealed the pilots inside. It was a small squadron, maybe ten ships, but Kim's stomach clenched with white heat and her fingers moved quickly, retargeting,

Her missile launched just as the aerials released their own assault and the resulting explosion shook Dee, jolting Kim despite her restraints. She flipped Dee over, getting out of the impact zone, gulping at the evidence of devastation left behind, then righted herself.

She hit the comms, rattling off quick commands to get the team into new formations and didn't need a second glance at her readouts to see that she was obeyed.

She again adjusted for Dmitriy and unleashed a blistering barrage from her guns.

If she thought the battle was chaos before, it was pure Hades now. Dropships were trying to reintegrate their formation, the rocks were zooming by and the aerial dogfight was scorching and close.

She sort of wished she had spoken to Trini before she left. But if she had, the other woman would have definitely locked her in the Kwans' basement and thrown away the key. And this was where Kim belonged. In the air, with the stick in her hand, her eyes on the enemy as he went down, down, down.

Before he got to her brother. No one was getting to her brother. Or any of her loved ones.

She assessed the display, fourteen out of her sixteen fighters remaining, the second taken out by the initial blast of the alien aerials. And then there was Dmitriy, smoke throwing off from his right wing as he engaged one of the hostiles. She didn't have Aisha's Bear spirit or Billy's Wolf spirit within her but she growled as she banked sharply, coming on Dmitriy's left to relieve him with a bang of her fist on the missile launch button.

Kim was pure instinct, some part of her tracking the battle, giving commands, darting with all the speed that Dee could muster to keep her people alive, but the rest of her just roaring to destroy. She wouldn't let a single invader get away, not if she could help it.

Then she was rocked, her helmet cushioning most of the impact as she smacked back into her seat and fire bloomed in her shoulder.

Dee spun, the coordinated attack from three aerials having taken out a wing and her steering, and Kim swallowed against the nausea and growled out the filthiest stream of curse words she could string together. Some were not in English – thanks, Rocky. Her head spinning, she smacked the eject button with a clenched fist. As her body was sucked out into the endless sky, she engaged the short-range comms in her helmet. "Ejecting, ejecting, ejecting!"

"Good luck," a cool, British voice responded. Althea Westerly was born just north of London and planned to die there. Kim knew she could rely on steady, even-keeled Al to notify Wing Command to look out for her and to bring the squad back home. The tall redhead with perfect cheekbones was her second in command and, after Billy, her closest friend at the Program.

And that was the thought she clung to as she plummeted down, the Dnieper River cutting a long blue-gray swath through the city below, and the broken vestiges of the golden domes of the cathedrals winking against the rays of the sun that struggled through the debris of the battle above. The explosions raged on, but she couldn't lift her head to look, shuddering as nausea fought its way up her throat, acrid and sweet, like burnt pineapple.

This was nothing like jumping out of a Zord in her Ranger suit.

She yanked the ripcords on her parachute with frozen fingers, the sweltering sauna inside her flight suit while in Dee – she tamped down the sharp agony she shouldn't have felt at that loss – turning bitingly chilled in the open air. The chute screeched, then shot up, yanking her body with it before it stabilized her fall.

"Sorry, Billy," she mouthed more than said as her vision began to dance, the River below flowing in new shapes and colors bleeding over those golden sparkles, pink and white and red and blue and yellow and black and green and….

And yet, even as her fingers slipped off the cords and her arms dropped to hang lifelessly against her sides, moved only by the whims of the wind, and her eyes slowly slid closed, bringing darkness to her entire world, she felt sure that she wasn't finished. She was a Ranger. Once a Ranger, always a Ranger. And she wasn't done kicking ass and not taking names.

The ground troops were engaged in a battle of their own. Although Alpha Squadron disrupted the landing pattern and destroyed a good portion of the dropships, several hundred of them still made it aground.

Luckily, unlike the invaders, the Allied forces were tightly coordinated.

The message – fighter down, search and rescue - relayed from the Alpha Squad to Wing Command, which was filtered to the troops, did nothing to disrupt that.

The tank units continued rolling forward, blowing holes in the alien formation, while the infantry used the shattered landscape to pick away at the enemy forces. The air was thick with smoke, the twelve hundred year old city dingy and dim. The birthplace of Old Rus was dying, accompanied by the shrieking screams of missiles, the rhythmic crunches of the caterpillars of the tank units eating up the debris and the discordant harmony of the gunfire bursts, mourned by the scorched corpses of its famed chestnut trees. But it wasn't going to go out easy.

While much of the population had been evacuated, Kiev was a city that knew survival.

Many World War II veterans settled in the urban center after the city was freed from occupation and the war ended. They fed their children and grandchild tales of the Nazi invasion, of the partisan troops fighting, barely equipped, outside devastated small villages and larger towns, of the Red Army coming together and repelling the invaders at great cost but with great pride. While some of the veterans may have gone to their final peace, their stories lived in the very soul of Kiev.

The remaining populace, mostly the younger generations, lived through Chernobyl, a nuclear disaster that spewed radiation barely sixty miles away, lived through fall of the Soviet empire, lived through the economic and social turbulence… they had no intention of giving the aliens their city without a fight. So they hunkered down in bunkers, some hastily constructed, some dating back to Stalin's time, the war-time of their grandparents, and assisted the Allied forces. Sometimes it was with homemade explosives, and sometimes it was with the supplies that the forces were able to pass to them.

The message from Wing Command passed on to them too.

The message from Wing Command meant nothing more than the words… except to a select few.

Captain Jason Lee Scott, commander of a tank unit, relayed it to his men in a roughened voice that hitched - but didn't dare break - as they encroached on a wide alley, guns blazing.

Marusya Chaplinskaya, a local, forcefully did not stumble as she ducked around a crumbling outer wall of the Dinamo Stadium and discharged a volley into an alien soldier before ducking out of view again. The resulting shockwave left a grim, bared-toothed smile on her ash-smudged face.

Lt. Thomas Oliver signaled his squadmates over the comms in their modified morse code. This was the situation they trained for. Special Ops carried on during battle, often behind the lines. He didn't know much about the aerial battle that just took place in the Kievan skies but this was the first time the Allies have deployed fighters. That meant every fighter was special. For more reasons than one…

Tommy only had six soldiers at his disposal but they were all Army Rangers and, while this wasn't quite like leading his old Ranger team, he knew his people and not a single one would stop until they were all dead or the mission was complete.

He flipped open his tablet and engaged GPS map, scanning the display for the distress code from the downed pilot.

Occasionally Kim just came to.

Her eyelids would slit open, revealing a dim, smeared world, the wavering shapes of crumbling buildings shuddering before her, sometimes punctuated by the blooming rosacea of detonating munitions. The shockwaves jolted her body, the general ennui that blanketed the whining of her banged up muscles and bones ebbing away to briefly remind her of what was probably a broken left arm, a messed about right shoulder and at least three fractured ribs. A gulp of smoky air, and then she would swim back into the dark, accompanied only by a wave of fuchsia wings.

When she felt someone's fingers on the side of her neck, feeling for the pulse at her throat, she was sure it was just part of the darkness, part of the dreams and memories that floated in her head, comforting and mocking her at the same time.

With a groan, she forced her eyes open and for a moment, just for a moment, thought it was Tommy kneeling in front of her, dressed in urban camouflage gear. It couldn't be. Tommy was safe and sound at home. Wherever that was. Sharp, bracing regret shot through her insides like cheap cognac. It's been forever since they broke up, young, feckless teenagers, and, if she was going to die… oh man that would really let Billy down… if she was going to die, she wished it wasn't without having Tommy back in her life. They were friends once, weren't they?

"Ma'am?" the young man asked, his voice soft and drawling. He did look like Tommy a little, dusky skin and warm brown eyes under a camouflage helmet. He was built stocky, though, solid, more like Jason.

Kim tried to speak but what came out at her first try was more gibberish than English, her tongue swollen thick and dry. She was grateful that it was one of the NATO troops that found her rather than either the Russians or Ukrainians, who comprised most of the Allied forces in Kiev. Her Slavic languages were pretty rusty, although she did learn some of the good curses at the Olympics. She coughed, thinking some of those good curses, and tried again.

"I'm…okay," she muttered, the words mangled and slow. "M'arm s'broken 'n my ribs…"

She felt her vision start to waver again as the young man yanked his canteen off his waist. She felt the liquid drip over her mouth and swallowed greedily, painfully past the badly crushed glass in her throat, which took the rest of her energy. Holding her eyes open was too hard and the world fell away, only the soldier's words drifting garbled into her hearing. They didn't seem directed at her.

When she resurfaced, she again thought she was seeing Tommy, kneeling next to the young man she thought was Tommy the first time.

No matter how much she blinked, her eyes sore and dry, this new apparition continued to be Tommy. Tommy, who was supposed to be safe at home. Tommy, whose lips were pressed together grimly, whose tan skin was liberally marked with soot and whose body and head were clad in the same camouflage as the other guy.

She tried to shake head to will the image away but moving her neck sent jolts of fire along her shoulders and down her body, which was laid sort of half-cocked on her folded-up parachute. Her ribs were definitely broken. And there may have been shrapnel dug in her right shoulder, which made her completely useless when matched with her broken left arm.

"Hold still, Kimberly," the man insisting to be Tommy said in Tommy's voice, only older and gruffer. The other man again dribbled water into her swollen mouth. The tepid liquid smoothed her crystalline tongue and the buildup of ash, mucus and fear in her throat.

"Not… T'mmy…" she denied. The not-Tommy's eyes crinkled in the way Tommy's eyes used to when he thought she did something adorable but knew that he couldn't smile because she would be mad. Then the crinkle vanished as his hands, which had been moving clinically – definitely not Tommy – over her body reached the back of her right shoulder. Oh yeah, definitely shrapnel.

"Kim, I have to get the shrapnel from your shoulder and splint your arm before we move you to base and your first aid kit is missing," not-Tommy said. He turned his head to the other guy and jerked his chin towards an olive green pack, which was left on what appeared to be a quarter of a white-painted wooden door. "Shane, get me the alcohol."

"For you, for her or for the wounds?" Shane asked as he retrieved a translucent bottle from the pack.

Not-Tommy glowered as he grabbed the bottle. "Kim, this is going to sting."

Kimberly knew fire. She flew the Firebird, flames kindling at her core, thunder and lightning lashing out at her foes. It was all born within Kim, all passed through her, scorching her in its wake, twining life and death together as the Firebird took on enemies magnitudes larger than herself with the same spunk Kim brought to everything. Kim carried that fire to the Crane. It was that fire that won her several medals at the Pan Globals and the Olympics. It was that fire that made her perfect at her germinating career, fast talking, fast moving, freelance non-profit networking.

And it was the fire she rained on the enemy – first in the sims, then in training exercises and then in the sky before getting shot down because the fire told her that she couldn't let anyone else get hurt first. No one before her.

Still, when not-Tommy peeled her torn flightsuit away from the gash in her shoulder and splashed ethyl alcohol onto the abused flesh, scalding her wound, her muscles liquefied and her bones scorched into ash. And her mind faded through grayscale.

But she wasn't allowed to stay away for long.

"Kim, you have to stay awake so we can move out," she heard not-Tommy say a short time later, water splashing on her face.

She blinked blearily, shifting her limbs to try to figure out what state they were in. It seemed that the men put her blackout time to good use – her left arm was bound to her body in a wide bandage that also held together her ribs and her shoulder seemed to be taped up as well, missing its decorative shrapnel. Dark eyelashes fluttered with exhaustion as she moaned against having to deal with this noisy, flashy world.

"Come on, Kim, we have to get you to the National Library where the base is set up for the wounded. They can helo you out of there."

Not-Tommy brushed the fringe of her bangs away from her cheek – someone got her helmet off at some point – his bare, calloused fingers ginger and warm on her skin and then she knew. This really was Tommy. No one else had ever touched her this hesitantly, this electrically. No one else… she shook off the thought and fought to keep away the swirling deep. "How far?" she choked out.

"About fifteen klicks," Tommy said, glancing at Shane.

Kim blanched, whatever color left in her face vanishing into the air around them. Less than ten miles but not by much.

As Tommy radioed out instructions and Shane slid liquidly into the shadows between the block buildings ahead of them, Kim tried to sit up. The movement was accompanied by several bursts of lightning inside her body and the quieter whine of a general sense that her entire being wanted nothing more than to let the pain fade her away again. Only the stubborn set of her jaw and fierce focus on the here and now kept her from obeying.

The fingers of her right hand landed on the pant-leg of her flight-suit, stiff and bristled where it was whole, and her ring finger felt through the tear onto her goose-bumped skin. She inhaled slowly, counting mississippis, almost tasting the bitter char in the air from the explosions of the guns and bombs, pretending for a moment that it was just fireworks and barbeques, the best possible Fourth of July.

In a way, maybe it was. This was about nothing more than freedom. No one really knew what the aliens wanted but it definitely wasn't to have milk and cookies with the humans, swapping bedtime stories about beautiful princesses who live happily ever after being rescued by gallant princes. This war was winner take all. Victory meant life and freedom. Defeat – death.

Kim didn't believe in defeat. Several lifeless coins etched with animal visages attested to that, and so did a number of ribboned medals. The medals were stored in the open in a glass frame, the coins in a wall safe behind a print of Eric Walter Powell's BE2C Aeroplanes over the Somme, but they meant the same thing. Kimberly Anne Hart did not give up.

So the darkness receded and she looked over at Tommy. Tommy who still made her heart flop and hurt and who should not have goddamn been here. What the hell was the bastard doing here? But she didn't let any of that out, didn't even pay attention to that voice, deep down, suspiciously sounding like Trini, reminding her that she had no moral high ground about a former Ranger stepping up to war. She just looked at him with eyes even and steady, brown like the earth in Angel Grove Park, and said, "Get me upright."

His brown eyes locked on her brown eyes and the world stilled, the battle gone silent, the silence electric. It was only a moment, though, and when the moment was over, he bent over, wrapped his arms around her, smelling far too much like himself under the char and the smoke and that tangy, metallic scent that clung to her nostrils. Gently, slowly, he slid her body against his, lifting her to her feet.

Kim wondered if this was punishment for not telling Trini directly that she was enlisting. Or maybe she really had died and gone to hell and this was what the rest of eternity would be like. As Tommy steadied her swaying body, his large hands splayed against her back, radiating warmth even through the heavy fabric of her suit, she sort of wondered if maybe that wasn't the worst of all possible hells.

Tommy shifted back, as if testing to see if she would stay up without a full body prop.

She lifted her head, their faces inches apart, though he towered over her as always. "I can do this," she whispered, maybe because she hadn't the strength to be louder or maybe because something in his angular, taut features encouraged the intimacy.

"I… I know…" he said. He seemed to be about to say something else but his radio crackled, Shane's voice coming through.

"We've got incoming," Shane said tersely.

Tommy nodded, rearranged Kim against his side, and radioed back, "Let's move."

The streets were full of overturned, shattered cars, chunks of building facades, and gnarled, dead trees, missiles squealing nearby, the detonations sending more detritus in all directions. It was a hard hiking landscape, more so for a woman who, while in peak physical form, had just been tossed out of the sky.

Sometimes, Kim managed to move on mostly her own power, just using Tommy as an impromptu crutch, but, more often than not, he just hauled her along, her petite form a dead weight against his side. Sometimes, she'd black out, coming to when he prodded her gently, trying to keep her awake, or when bombs went off too close, shaking the whole world around them like a child playing with a bowl of jello.

Sometimes, Kim caught sight of Tommy's squadmates, ahead, or to one side or the other – she knew there was someone behind too but couldn't turn to see - slipping between shadows, removing with a vengeance anything between them and the way ahead.

She couldn't track time. She estimated roughly that their slowed pace wasn't getting them to the library in anything less than several hours, more if they had to make too many detours. But she couldn't figure out how long they had been walking, couldn't remember where the sun started, when she could even note its position through the battle dampened skies.

"We need to take cover," came an urgent whisper. "A tank unit incoming skirmish."

Tommy paused, leaned her against the wall, shielding her with his body as he pulled his tablet and checked the map. "St. Michael's Monastery," he said. "We're just down the block." He tucked the unit away and gestured, directing the team.

As Tommy drew Kim quickly towards shelter, she smiled, the expression stretching sore, bruised skin. Nana Connie, her mom's mom, had been a devout Anglican and while the rest of Kim's family were, at best, indifferent to religion, Nana told some fantastic Bible stories. How accurate they had been, Kim never cared to check but she was rarely anything but rapt in listening to them. St. Michael had figured prominently in those tales, justice and judgment, flaming sword aloft. How apt that it was his protection they sought now.

The golden domes of the monastery were in disarray, not one still whole, dimmed pieces of masonry strewn about the street. The firefight and tank approach grew louder, nearly upon them, and Tommy's team oriented with gestures only. One of his men caught her by the other side and the two of them hefted her right into the crumbling structure between them. A part of a room was still standing and Tommy helped her into the corner while the other man vanished again.

She breathed, slowly, deeply, but she knew she was just imagining that, somewhere in the miasma of dust, she got a whiff of Tommy's natural aroma. She closed her eyes, leaned against his solid bulk, and, for just a moment, pretended she was fifteen again, fearless and fiery, resting after an unqualified victory against one of Rita or Zedd's monsters.

"Come on," Tommy whispered, the words warm against her ear. "There's a solid cellar here."

Whatever electric grid had been functional in this part of Kiev, it was long down. One of the soldiers clicked on a flashlight, leading the way to and down the stairs and Kim absently noticed a tight bun just under the edge of the helmet. It was strangely comforting to know that at least one of her rescuers was a woman. Otherwise, it felt a little too much Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and she was no dainty princess in distress.

And yes it did appear that Tommy's squad numbered seven, counting him, and she didn't roll her eyes only because she knew it would hurt.

Half of the squad stayed above ground, melting into the shadows to monitor the skirmish, and Kim added them to her short list of people in Kiev that she worried about personally. As Tommy helped her down to a bench, she tapped his arm with her index finger, even that light gesture sending a spike into her shoulder.

"What?" he whispered and tucked her against the wall, again guarding her with his body.

"My team?" she asked. There was no use asking about Jason. That sort of individual detail wouldn't be disseminated widely.

"One other pilot down, rescue is triangulating the signal," he replied gruffly. Kim tipped her head against his shoulder, eyelids sliding down as nausea climbed up her throat. She swallowed, the acrid creep of the bile seeping over the root of her tongue, and Tommy offered her a half-full bottle of water. The first swig stuttered to a stop part-way down her esophagus and the second didn't even make it into her mouth before she was sliding forward, hunched, Tommy's arm catching her across her midsection as her body heaved, acid dripping down from her lips. The bottle fell to the floor, leaking precious liquid into the cracks between the stone.

Nearly silent footsteps approached and a flashlight clicked on, a soldier picking up the bottle and setting it next to Tommy with a nod. Then the light turned off.

She felt Tommy's other hand at the base of her neck, his fingers stroking a soothing line.

There was little in her stomach and the full body convulsions set her injuries aflame. She slumped against him and he resettled her, offered the water again. She declined, just closed her eyes and drifted, the hushed voices of the squad rocking her into a lull.

Consciousness came in degrees and then jerked forward as she panicked at the absolute blackness around her. Tommy's soft murmur anchored her and she reoriented, inhaling slowly as her heart-rate paced down and the glowing embers of pain in her arm, shoulder and ribs kindled brighter. She exhaled quietly.

"Hang in there," he whispered.

She was relieved that he didn't ask how she was doing. He didn't need to. This wasn't their first battle together and now probably not their last.

"I'm sorry," she said abruptly and felt him jostle against her side. "For everything really but most of all for having left silence between us for so long."

He didn't reply, not at first, but his thumb stroked gently along her jaw. "I am too," he said finally and, though she couldn't draw air deeply without her damaged ribs howling in protest, it was as if she could really breathe.

She thought about saying something more and there was so much she had to tell him, all these words jumbled inside her head and struggling to get put in order, but he pulled her ever so slightly closer to him and she bit on her lower lip, smiling and wanting to cry all at the same time.

Unseeing, she reached out, found his knee and rested her hand on it, pressing lightly through the heavy duty camo fabric.

Some time later came the screech of the cellar door and the black faded to gray, dim shapes taking form.

They moved out again, picking their way through the destruction left behind by the tank unit skirmish and Kim hoped that maybe it had been Jason and he was fine, just fine.

She slumped more heavily against Tommy, lethargy creeping through her limbs and now he was mostly just pulling her along. The blackouts came closer together, the exhaustion and drained adrenaline a powerful cocktail, and their passage through the torn city was mostly a kaleidoscope of images, fallen building facades, the abbreviated movements of the soldiers around her and, still, the reverberation of the battle all throughout.

This time, she came to and found herself laying down with a familiar face frowning at her.

"Ni," Kim whispered. "That you?" Distantly, she recognized the swimming sensation as morphine, dampening the edges of the pain.

"Yes," Trini replied sternly. "Lucky for you."

"I'm very lucky today," Kim drawled.

Trini pressed her lips together but they wobbled anyway and then she swiftly leaned down and dropped a kiss on Kim's forehead. "We are all very lucky today."

Kim reached up to straighten a dark strand that fell across Trini's forehead and startled. The medical bracelet attached to her wrist sported an unusual accessory - a small, white feather taped at its seam. She smiled.

Trini caught Kim's hand mid-air, lacing their fingers together, and her face softened, not quite a smile but an expression full of warmth, the corners of her eyes crinkled. "Go to sleep," she soothed. "When you wake up, give Billy a hug and get better quick. We have a war to win."

Kim squeezed Trini's hand and obediently closed her eyes.


End file.
